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Small Business Secrets

Ways your small business can avoid falling victim to phishing emails

Email phishing is the attempt by scammers to infiltrate your system and steal sensitive information about your business. This can be data regarding employees, login details and more importantly banking details. With 6.4 billion fake emails sent worldwide every day this form of scamming is, unfortunately, a common practice but here are some tips to avoid letting your business fall victim to it.

Security

Take the time to download and purchase anti-malware software. This is a good first step in setting up barriers between you and potential scammers. There are various software options available such as SpamAssassin and SPAMfighter which will spot potential phishing emails before they end up in your inbox. For more software suggestions please click here.

Additionally, downloading anti-virus programmes such as Norton and McAfee will also prove useful. It would be beneficial to do comparison shopping to find programmes for your small business.

Cyber Insurance

Following on from the last point, taking extra caution in purchasing cyber insurance will work to strengthen your business. In fact, as regular insurance does not cover cyber attacks it’s important to make this extra purchase. 76% of businesses were reported of being victims of a phishing attack over the last 12 months, this will be a worthwhile addition to your security framework.

Red Flags

It is sometimes easy to spot phishing emails by carefully reading the contents. Most of the time there are grammatical errors or some from ‘weird’ sounding email addresses. Scammers will also try to mimic a legitimate company email. Take precautions and read the whole email thoroughly to ascertain who it is actually from.

If there’s anything to raise suspicion from the outset it would be best not to engage. That means don’t click links, download files, or open attachments. Generally, you should only open email attachments if you are expecting them and know what information they will contain. If you do receive an email from a company you correspond with regularly, but if it looks suspicious contact the company to make sure it is legit before clicking or downloading the contents.

Educating your employees on how to spot these red flags will also minimise the risk to your business.

Drill

Next, a useful step would be to test your defence mechanisms work. This can be done by sending fake phishing emails to your employees to make sure that they are checking for the flags mentioned above. This will also give you an insight in evaluating how good your anti-malware features are at identifying potential scam emails. This method is usually overlooked but is worth doing as with practice can make it easier to spot these cyber threats quickly and more effectively.

Overall, we hope this post will help you in not only protecting yourself from phishing emails but also in how to identify them. Taking into account the steps outlined above, your business can work towards strengthening your cyber-security and keep you trading online with ease and confidence.

For more tips and tricks to help your small business thrive, be sure to check back onto www.bonline.com/blog for more resources.